ZOE / Personalised Nutrition

Metabolic-Health@outlook.com
Jun 16
3 min read

ZOE / Personalised Nutrition claims to offer “a cutting-edge approach” that uses individual biological data that includes microbiome composition, blood sugar, blood fats, and inflammation markers “to tailor diet advice". It's at the frontier of precision nutrition, but it’s important to separate what’s promising from what’s proven.

What the Science Says

The up-to-date scientific evidence (up to 2025) tells us that personalised responses to food are very real. The PREDICT studies (by ZOE and collaborators like King's College London and Harvard) showed that individuals have different glucose, lipid (fat), and insulin responses to the same foods and that the gut microbiome plays a key role in these responses. You can find all the Zoe publications here - https://zoe.com/our-studies#.

While the results, at least from Zoe, favour this approach both the study designs and the approaches used are somewhat predictable. This is just one example here - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-02951-6. Were the authors surprised that they provided intensive personalised dietary program (PDP) support vs some generic general advice - that the blood health markers wouldn’t be better in the treatment group? Of course the Zoe group would improve. The volunteers likely thought that they were receiving state of the art guidance and will benefit from the placebo effect. That said, its not easy fixing the fundamental floors in this study design. I experience similar issues with my own research.

Regardless, the evidence to support Zoe’s approach is still in the early-stages. Large-scale, long-term RCTs showing better health outcomes vs. standard diets are still limited. Benefits seem clearest for metabolic flexibility, pre-diabetes, and glucose/lipid regulation — less evidence is available to support weight loss or longevity. In addition, human behaviour and context are very important. Even with personalised data, habit change, stress, sleep, and social factors play huge roles in outcomes. People that comes to see me having used the Zoe approach can have a very different few on whether Zoe works for them or not. This comes down to the mental state of each individuals. Having such data available, can have an additive effect on mental overload (or data overload). Providing yet another metric to be compared against others. Just one more thing to worry and already overworked mind.

And we know that stress can have a negative influence on our metabolic health. In a study examining Oral Glucose Tolerance Tests (OGTT) responses - Higher cortisol levels correlated negatively with insulin sensitivity following the 2‑hour glucose challenge (r = 0.15, p < 0.05) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.govpmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.govacademic.oup.com. This indicates that stress-driven cortisol elevation can blunt insulin action and impair glucose metabolism. The studies of Zoe really should be controlling for stress in their work.

To finish this summary off, I would suggest that if you are someone who is likely to worry, is often tired, stressed, feeling drowned with the ‘list of things to do’, I would stay well clear of the Zoe approach and listen to your own body. Reduce the number of things you have to worry about each day and your bodies response to healthy foods will be a great deal better - as your body will be able to extract all of the goodness from them if you are less stressed. If you love lots of numbers and a long list of things to do and remember - you may well benefit from Zoe. Please remember that there is no real data to support that Zoe can bring about long-term metabolic or weight benefits. Lets wait and see.

Do you think Zoe works to improve overall health?